Readers ask me questions and want to know: do we still need umpires, what’s wrong with Mike Moustakas and are the Royals feeling the pressure of being front runners? Keep reading and find out if I know the answers or just had to make some stuff up.

If a left-handed pitcher’s front leg goes back and breaks the invisible plane between the pitching rubber and first base, he has to deliver the ball to home plate; otherwise it’s a balk. The first base umpire has the best view of this and normally makes the call, but Scott Barry did not think Franklin Morales balked because he didn’t call it; the home plate Angel Hernandez did. And if you’re wondering how the umpire at home plate can see if a pitcher’s front leg goes slightly behind the rubber, join the club.

A quality strike is a pitch that not only finds the strike zone, but finds a certain part of the strike zone. Hang around with pitchers, coaches and managers long enough and you’ll hear about the quadrants of the zone: up and in, down and in, up and away and down and away. Unless a pitcher has ungodly stuff, he needs to be able to throw strikes to those quadrants.

Even though some fans might like to think ballplayers should go 100 percent all the time or managers should treat every game like it’s game seven of the World Series, that’s not realistic. Play like that and you’d be burned out not long after the All-Star game. Professional athletes and teams have to pace themselves and, at times, managers have to admit the odds of winning a game aren’t good—and that was the case Wednesday afternoon.

As near as I can tell everyone’s pretty happy about the Royals acquiring Johnny Cueto and Ben Zobrist. So if you’re one of those people, remember that you wanted this, even if one of the players the Royals gave away becomes a big star on another team.

On Monday afternoon I did an online chat, and the majority of questions asked me to predict the future. I don’t mean to disappoint you, but I don’t know the answers to any of those questions, and at this time, neither does anybody else.

When I asked what to look for when Yordano Ventura was on the mound, I was told to pay attention to his secondary pitches and how soon he established them. Ventura can throw 100 mph, but if he can’t throw anything but a fastball for a strike, hitters will wait for those fastballs and be all over them. Sunday, he went to his curve early.

When the Royals went to St. Louis to play a makeup game against the Cardinals, there were two cases of a runner on first base taking second base with a runner on third. Both times the official scorekeeper called it “defensive indifference” because the Cardinals did nothing to stop the runner from taking second. I called it BS.

Saturday night, Houston Astros right fielder Colby Rasmus spent much of the evening playing shallow — and I mean really shallow. Rasmus was so shallow he might have been able to hand the ball to an infielder after making a catch. The Astros were gambling that Royals hitters were not going to be able to hit a ball over Colby’s head — and they were on a winning streak.

I recently wrote an article about bad scorekeeping in St. Louis. In three games, I had seen four bad calls, and all of them made the Cardinals look good. Apparently that hit a nerve, because I’ve been hearing about it ever since. So now you get to hear about it, too. Here are some of the comments and my responses.

Once again, Alcides Escobar swung at the first pitch of the game, and once again it worked. Esky singled. According to Baseball Reference, Alcides is hitting .346 and his on-base percentage is .400 as the first batter of a game, so I guess his unorthodox approach is working.

Baseball is about numbers, but those numbers start when the person keeping score makes a judgment call and some scorekeepers’ judgment isn’t very good. This season I’ve watched the Royals play the Cardinals a total of three games, so feel free to question the sample size. But in those three games I saw some bad scorekeeping decisions and all of them made the Cardinals look good.

Every once in a while I get an email or comment that’s worth answering at length. And if one fan is interested in the answer, I figure other fans might feel the same way. I guess we’ll find out, won’t we?

In the bottom of the seventh inning in Wednesday night’s game against the Pittsburgh Pirates, the score was tied 1-1. There was one out, Alex Rios was on first base, Omar Infante was on third and Jarrod Dyson was at the plate. The situation was right for a squeeze play, but which squeeze play?

Being able to throw a fastball 100 mph is a rare talent and Yordano Ventura has it. But if the fastball is your go-to pitch when you have to throw a strike, hitters will look for it and be ready when they get it.

On Saturday afternoon the Royals played a mistake-filled 13-inning game, but still came away with a win. After that game I wrote about the mistakes they made. But 24 hours later the Royals played a nearly perfect game, and it’s only fair that I write about all the things they did right.